Talk:Penet remailer

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Good article. It tells a story, it isn't convoluted with compex intertwinements of POV and NPOV. It is a straight story that makes sense but presents the information a reader wants to know. Whether a reader is for more author protection, for protections against some kinds of pornogrophy or for individual enterpise, it tells a story that can be understood. Terryeo 11:48, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

There's a lot more detail about Scientology's raid on Penet, which led to its shutdown, which could be said. See my article with Jeff Jacobsen in Skeptic magazine (vol. 3, no. 3, 1995), "Scientology v. the Internet," as well as this blog entry. Lippard 18:57, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

Too bad the part about kiddy porn not going through is wrong. Due to UUENCODE and BASE64 encoding of text, it was quite possible to multipart split an image that was uuencoded or base64 encoded. During this time period this was also common practice. During my time working for AOL I regularly saw usenet posts of child porn anonymously remailed. Not to mention there are child porn stories still hosted on http://www.asstr.org that contain data about being remailed through penet.fi.  ALKIVAR™ 10:26, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

Could it be it was a specific instance that was proven false? And what about the 15k limit? Most images are much larger than that. --Golbez 14:58, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

I personally used to send jpgs and gifs (which was pretty much the only image formats commonly used during penet's life) on usenet between 20k and 60k in size... the thing most people forget is no one used high res images back then... 800x600 was considered high res! Hell SVGA wasnt even an official standard yet at that point, they were still modifying it to mean more than 256 colors. So since most images were small ... 15k would be huge! A 45k jpg or gif split into 3 parts would have easily been doable through penet.fi. While I cant point to a specific instance this many years later, the capability was most certainly there.  ALKIVAR™ 20:54, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, I had just woken up when I wrote that, and it wasn't til I saw your response in my watchlist that I realized you can post multi-post images when they're encoded! And yeah, a 15k gif can be okay, but still pretty small. But not tiny, either. --Golbez 22:21, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

This article is so vague as to be bordering on inaccurate. It could do with a lot more work. I've tried to explain the remailer's origin and implementation. I want to give more detail about the compromises soon as I can assemble all the info. Zed 17:26, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

Done with my edits for now Zed 16:07, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Name?

Anyone know why it (The DNS) was "Penet" ? 68.39.174.238 16:03, 17 August 2006 (UTC)